gradually reducing existence to the naked business of keeping
himself alive. It was the futility of his multiplied shifts and
privations that made them seem unworthy of a high attitude; the
sense that, however rapidly he eliminated the superfluous, his
cleared horizon was likely to offer no nearer view of the one
prospect toward which he strained. To give up things in order to
marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them up without
being brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.

Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn
from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his
purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course
with a contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up
and look out of the window just as it was growing too dark to see
anything! There was a man rich enough to do what he pleased--had
he been capable of being pleased--yet barred from all conceivable
achievement by his own impervious dulness; while, a few feet off,
Glennard, who wanted only enough to keep a decent coat on his back
and a roof over the head of the woman he loved, Glennard, who had
sweated, toiled, denied himself for the scant measure of
opportunity that his zeal would have converted into a kingdom--sat
wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned from the
club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out of
town, he would still be no nearer attainment.

The Spectator had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his
eye fell again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs.
Aubyn. He had read it for the first time with a scarcely
perceptible quickening of attention: her name had so long been
public property that his eye passed it unseeingly, as the crowd in